Live in the Body of A Sea Turtle with Another Person. Share Underwater Life with Your Pal.
We present Sea Turtle Study as a game designed to enhance team-building through joint control of an avatar, leveraging synchrony between two players in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE). In this virtual reality (VR) game, players drive the movement of a sea turtle hunting for jellyfish by their combined movements.
Challenge
With the rising of consumer grade VR devices, a wider population can explore in virtual reality. How will people team up with others in virtual reality in an embodied way, which differs from usual face-to-face interactions?
introduction
Team-building is important for many groups, and many team activities designed to enhance rapport use exercises that enhance nonverbal synchrony. Activities such as dancing together, or singing or marching in unison are examples of activities designed to build rapport by encouraging synchronous behavior (Lakens & Stel, 2011). Experimentally inducing synchronous nonverbal behavior aids in affiliation (Hove & Risen, 2009), and the ability to jointly act (Valdesolo, Ouyang & DeSteno, 2010).
Such interactions, especially those in a business context, will often require participants to travel long distances in order to participate in person, so that they can leverage the full benefits of social presence. Virtual reality (VR) allows participants to experience a relatively high level of social presence, and could thus be a reasonable, and resource-sparing alternative for face-to- face interactions. In addition, synchrony can be manipulated in a virtual environment (Tarr, Slater & Cohen, 2018). However, VR also allows for other advantages.
It is relatively easy to transform players’ tracked movements in a CVE to change the nature of their social interactions (Bailenson, Beall, Loomis, Blascovich and Turk, 2004). Participants can not only control an avatar that looks very different from their own body, they can also complete tasks using a control schema that differs from the normal human template (Won, Bailenson, Lee & Lanier, 2015). We aimed to investigate how such novel embodiment might affect social closeness and social presence, and potentially lead to higher rapport.
DESIGN
To achieve novel embodiment for synchrony team-building cultivation, there were three design requirements,
1. Embodiment & Control:
The players should be constrained in one virtual avatar with physical constraints on each other;
2. Avatar & Environment:
A virtual environment and a virtual avatar should be built to make players feel presence and immersive;
3. Game Task:
The players should complete some tasks in a cooperative way.
Embodiment & Control:
People are accustomed to living as independent individuals. When they are required to be boned with another, the most intuitive physical constraint is location, just like conjoint twins. Though, they still own freedom of vision, namely independent field of view. Thus, two players would embody on a virtual avatar, whose movement and orientation are controlled by both combined movement.
Embodiment & Control Design Architect
How would we transform players’ inputs to the virtual avatar’s actions? There is a huge market of input options. Based on Rift/Vive, the playground is limited in room-scale with lighthouse tracking. Correspondingly, two hand controllers are the most normal and useful tools. To make players feel more immersive, we avoided traditional teleporting method and chose hands movements instead.
Avatar & Environment:
A lovely animated character, the red turtle, gave us inspirations on the avatar design. We made up a contextual design, a sea turtle swims in the underwater, passing through seaweeds, corals and watching shells and sea stars on the sand ground.
The Untextured Sea Turtle in Maya
The Well-Constructed Undersea World
Game Task:
In the virtual undersea where half dozen of jellyfishes float around, two players drive the sea turtle to swim and collect all jellyfishes.
The turtle’s speed is the vector addition of two users’ arm movements, which reflects the degree to which users’ movements are synchronous. The turtle’s direction is determined by the combined vector of two users’ body orientation.
implementation
Our initial implementation used the platform High Fidelity (highfidelity.com, retrieved March 1, 2018) which does not allow shared use of avatars. To achieve shared control of the turtle, we assigned High Fidelity avatars to users and generated the turtle as an entity controlled by the avatars’ movements. The game scripts process these movements to calculate and render the turtle’s movements at a frame-rate of 30 fps.
Setting up the game does not require knowledge of computer programming. However, if using the High Fidelity version, familiarity with the platform is recommended. All scripts can be found in the Github repository link [redacted for anonymity], along with a readme file for implementation.
Calculations Performed at Each Frame.
1. Convert the two avatars’ body yaw to radians to get the average. Convert the average yaw orientation to rotation and apply it to the turtle.
2. For each avatar, subtract the vector of Left Hand Position and Right Hand Position from the vector of Body Position. Apply a coordinate transform to the two result vectors, rotating the coordinate by the yaw orientation of the avatar body.
3. Results from #2 are left hand’s and right hand’s relative positions to the avatar body in vectors. Subtract these vectors from vectors of hands’ relative positions from last frame to get each hand’s displacement. Use only displacements along Z-axis. Sum to combine two avatars’ left-hand displacements along Z-axis. Sum to combine two avatars’ right-hand displacements along Z-axis.
4. Average left hand’s displacement and right hand’s displacement from Step #3. (We multiplied the average by 30 to get an appropriate speed along the Z-axis).
5. Read the turtle’s current body rotation and convert it to orientation. Take the yaw orientation. Rotate the coordinate by the yaw orientation and get the turtle’s velocity vector from the speed along Z-axis.
video
REFRENCE
Bailenson, J. N., Beall, A. C., Loomis, J. Blascovich, J. and Turk, M. (2004). Transformed
social interaction: Decoupling representation from behavior and form in collaborative
virtual environments. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, (13),
428—441.
Bailenson, J. N., & Yee, N. (2006). A longitudinal study of task performance, head movements,
subjective report, simulator sickness, and transformed social interaction in collaborative virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(6), 699-716.
Highfidelity.com, retrieved January 17, 2018.
Hove, M. J., & Risen, J. L. (2009). It's all in the timing: Interpersonal synchrony increases
affiliation. Social Cognition, 27(6), 949.
Lee, K. M. (2004). Presence, explicated. Communication theory, 14(1), 27-50.
Steptoe, W., Steed, A., & Slater, M. (2013). Human tails: ownership and control of extended
humanoid avatars. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 19(4), 583-590.
Tarr, B., Slater, M., & Cohen, E. (2018). Synchrony and social connection in immersive Virtual Reality. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 3693.
Valdesolo, P., Ouyang, J., & DeSteno, D. (2010). The rhythm of joint action: Synchrony
promotes cooperative ability. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(4), 693-695.
Won, A. S., Bailenson, J., Lee, J., & Lanier, J. (2015). Homuncular flexibility in virtual reality.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20(3), 241-259.